56 have been to an Athenian in the elev- enth century B.C. Lincoln's mother was younger than her husband, but her tastes, like his, were emphatically rooted in the past. She adored expensive lace and embroi- dery, and she worshipped the works of Richard Wagner. In 1924, she took her artistically inclined son on a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, where nineteenth-century sets were still being deployed. "Every leaf and twig was crisply netted," her son recalled fondly. "The dragon Faf- ner spouted real steam; the three Rhine maidens, supported on miniature pulpits on wheels, swam convincingly." When Kirstein was at Harvard, from 1926 to 1930, he seemed to find himself immersed in the past but at the same time confronted by the present. On the one hand, he was seeking out the ar- omatic cultural shades and traces of Melville, Hawthorne, and the Transcen- dentalists, which seemed to him to be everywhere around him in Massachusetts. On the other hand, he was in privileged alignment with the living, breathing spirit of modernism, with its strenuousness, its depersonalized exoticism, its intense cul- tural demands, its autarkic fervor. He contributed immensely to the links be- tween the university and the formation of American modernism: he founded and edited Hound & Horn, one of the erà s legendary periodicals, which pub- . - -- :> T7õ .ù --- ------ -- lished work by Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore. (Lincoln himself later described it as "a passport to the big world.") He also set up and ran the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was he and his Harvard friend Ed- ward M. M. Warburg who were respon- sible in the late twenties for putting on some of the first public exhibitions of modernist painting, including works by Picasso and de Chirico, in the United States. A fascination with the past was gen- erating its own antithesis, a zeal for the new. In Balanchine Kirstein would come to champion an artist who was par- ing down the referential and narrative elements in his medium toward a zero- point of abstraction. "Most of our cho- reography was insistently contrapuntal," Kirstein once wrote, "phrasing deliberate imbalance, syncopation, and calculated offbeats." As a result, he explained, per- haps with the faintest trace of morose- ness at the loss of the decorativeness his mother had taught him to love, "specta- cle, dominated by a painter's imagina- tion, no matter how appropriate or in- ventive its dancing, would always remain for us, with few exceptions, beyond need or possibility. . . . Balanchine's principal adjunct, apart from the dancers them- selves, would be music." -<;, -1' "If at first you don't succeed, subcontract it out. " THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 1998 Kirstein's fidelity to the past never disappeared. His sense of possibility was Romantic, and he scripted his life along the lines of the heroic adventurism of nineteenth-century novelists like Balzac, Stevenson, and Dickens, whose works he and his father had imbibed together. ' t the moment when joining oneself to modernism (Mrican art, Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky) was obligatory, my private exemplars were shelved in a secret li- brary," Kirstein once wrote as he re- flected on his early frame of mind. "I mirrored myself as Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré, Bulwer- Lytton's Pelham, most definitely Disrae1i's Coningsby." While that might sound merely fanciful in the mouths of some, Kirstein's ac- count of his life makes sense. Disregard- ing any idea of limits (chronological, material, financial), he did actually fol- low the trajectory of a young outsider at- tacking and mastering the highest cul- tural redoubts of what would become for a while the world's capital city. - AROUND 1932, Kirstein moved per- .L\. manendy to Manhattan. "I wanted to repudiate Harvard, I wanted to repu- diate Boston," he explained. "} wanted to make myself a New Yorker, or much more a sort of cosmopolitan." His first historic gestures toward cosmopolitarnz- ing not only himself but his country came a year or so later, when, after a se- ries of meetings in Paris and Lon- don, he persuaded Balanchine to come to America. The choreogra- pher, then suffering from tubercu- losis, was exhausted by the intrigues raging among the post- Diaghilev companies and was entranced by the prospect of a new start in the land of Ginger Rogers and jazz. In Europe in 1933, Kirstein listened, his "attention genuinely rapt," as Balanchine described his dreams of a new avant-garde dance aesthetic. In his turn, Kirstein produced a large map of the United States and spread it out, like a magic carpet, on the floor of his hotel room in London so that Balanchine could see the distance between Hartford, where their first temporary base in the country was to be, and "New York City and beyond." Years later, Kirstein described the scene: "Ev- erything lay in a spectacular fu- ture, the tactile presence of the big